Dry beans

When we lived in Wisconsin, about 2006, we discovered that one of the food storage cans we’d been given had rusted through. Now these were four gallon metal cans, about a foot square and a couple feet tall, heavy, with round paint can lids you had to pry up with a screwdriver. They had been in a garage in Ohio for years, on a stone and dirt floor, not wet exactly, but not dry. Ohio has moisture, enough for moss to grow on that floor.

We were given eight or nine of these cans, mostly full of wheat but three of them dry beans. They had been saved, as instructed by the prophet, for a famine or the end times, whichever came first. The top cans were still packed in cardboard boxes lined with newspaper; we knew their age because the newspapers were from 1955. By this time we’d had them 10 years, three of those years in Wyoming, desert-dry.

Wheat keeps almost forever; they’ve raised wheat from seed found in Egyptian tombs. But beans are finicky; after five years they get harder to cook, and after 25 years they’re downright difficult to soften. I took two cups of beans from this can, rinsed them off, soaked them overnight, and put them in the crockpot with some water. Three days later I threw them out; they were still like rocks. I tried again, this time adding baking soda and bringing the water and beans to a boil before soaking overnight. No dice. The beans resisted everything I could think to do to them. Finally I threw up my hands and tossed the remaining beans all over the back yard. The soil was sandy and wouldn’t hold water, but in one section I planted some squash and carrots. That section I watered regularly. The beans I threw there, grew!

They grew to be flourishing plants, four or five leaves each, bright green and likely to reach high. One night deer came and ate the bean plants down to one inch stems. They didn’t eat the other plants, just the beans.

As I retold this story to my son, he said, “Those beans got what they deserved, eaten by deer!”